


Extinction Is The Rule

by zuzeca



Category: Transformers (Bay Movies), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Awkward Conversations, For Science!, Gen, Less silly than it sounds, POV Minor Character, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 10:09:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1895085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zuzeca/pseuds/zuzeca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing about scientists, they can pull some pretty crazy stunts in their quest for the truth.</p><p>The thing about geologists, they rarely have to worry about being eaten by their specimens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Extinction Is The Rule

**Author's Note:**

> As you can probably guess, I finally got off my butt and saw Age of Extinction. Just a little bit of genfic playing around with the character of Darcy and the Dinobots after the end of the movie. Title ganked from a quote by Carl Sagan: "Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception." I suppose it's a good thing Grimlock and his band aren't so good at following rules. XD Happy reading.

The air is cold and thick with mist and Darcy has sweated through her shirt and parka, the damp fabric sticking to her skin and channeling a deep chill down her spine. Fresh, splintered fragments of wood and bark crunch under her boots, a swath of forest debris wider than a four-lane highway.

She isn’t cut out for this, tracking, hunting. Her specimens, as remote as they can be, generally stay put while she makes her way to them.

But the prospect of actually observing them, the lure of witness, pushes her onwards. She’s already forgotten how long she’s been following, fallen into the meditation of that steady loping gate, evolution’s own gift to her species, her breath hot and visible before her.

She tops a rise and looks down into the valley below, half-invisible with low-lying clouds, and sees them, a hellish marriage of technology and nature, all spines and blades and gunmetal grey against the brilliant green of the forest.

The hunched creature that the paleontologist in her calls a _Spinosaurus_ shakes its head, needled scutes rattling against each other and lets out a low rumble that shakes the air from half a kilometer. The twin-headed winged creature that the little girl in her can’t call anything other than _dragon_ squawks in reply from its perch on the _Triceratops_ —or is it _Torosaurus_ , she’s been out of the field too long—and stretches its wings before settling.

And then the king, damn the inaccuracy of its nomenclature to hell because there isn’t anything else _but_ king to call such a monstrosity, lifts a head the size of a locomotive and a quelling roar splits the air.

It’s deafening, echoing off the edges of the mountains, a tangible pressure and a warning that freezes something deep in her brain and gut, something deeper than the tracker, the runner, something that reads the situation and reminds her that for all her bravado, all her cleverness and adaptability, she is still prey.

Her knees go a little watery and she ends up sitting down suddenly, the damp mud soaking into her pants. She can hear the throb of her heartbeat in her ears in the ringing wake.

She stays like that, listening, eyes fixed on them, but there’s no charge, no communal shift of a pack on the scent of blood. The two-headed creature lifts a clawed wing and scratches behind its left head, the Triceratops idly gores a tree that’s older than her grandfather, the Spinosaurus sniffs the air, the king dozes.

It’s disconcerting. She isn’t used to this, this passive observation. Her specimens bend to her will. She holds them in her hands, traces the impression of bone in dead rock, cuts with drill and chisel and brush.

But perhaps she can become used to it.

She seeks out a rock overhang from where she can watch them and pitches her pup tent, barely larger than the cocoon of her sleeping bag. She strips out of her wet things, burrows in with an energy bar clutched in one hand and a notepad in the other and watches them in the fading light of the sun. Amusingly quaint technology, but it works as well now as when her distant, far-flung relative had hacked his way through jungle to paint a picture of a world that time forgot.

Twenty-four hours later she realizes she’s miscalculated.

Observation is bloody _boring_.

She’s not sure what she’d expected. They don’t have prey, don’t consume organic material, and she’s thanking all that’s good and just in the world that they haven’t taken it into their heads to go lay waste to a city because she isn’t sure anything could stop them. All they do is idle about their valley, tussling and screeching to each other, and occasionally breaking into long stints of strange noises which she begins to realize, with a subtle thrill, form the basis of a language that links them to Autobot and Decepticon alike.

She uses her recorder to capture the conversations; maybe she can find someone who can translate someday.

Exhaustion makes her complacent and their animalistic behavior lulls her into a false sense of security, creating the illusion that she’s so far beneath their notice that she can remain indefinitely, making her little notes and recordings.

So she’s utterly unprepared when, three days later, the king approaches _her_.

Water rolls in cold rivulets down the front of her tent as she pulls open the zipper, only to find herself staring into a spiked and toothed muzzle the size of a small apartment. Red, forward-facing eyes, a predator’s eyes, stare unblinking at her from over the edge of the overhang, its hind legs lost somewhere in the mist and trees below, an impossible to ignore indication of how buggering _big_ it is. She has no idea how long it’s been standing there.

 _This is it,_ she thinks. _This is how I die. Not crushed in a cave-in or blown up because some stupid tech couldn’t pack the explosives right. Eaten by an alien robot dinosaur. Can’t say I saw this coming._

The king shifts its jaw, massive mechanisms grinding and clicking and slowly, ponderously, as though feeling out the words, speaks.

“Why you here?”

She’s speechless, realizing too late she hasn’t accounted for this particular scenario. Her mind is a gibbering blank.

The huge head tilts very slightly and it speaks again, the words alien yet somehow familiar, prodding something in the back of her mind, in the soup of consciously learned material that rides over instinct and early programming.

Mandarin, god help her, it’s, he’s speaking Mandarin.

“I speak English,” she blurts, her body shaking, fighting the urge to sink back into bag and tent, as though they’ll somehow shield her from him.

He makes a noise of agreement and repeats himself, “Why you here?”

“I’m,” her mind is still a mess. “I was studying you.”

_Brilliant, Darcy. Humans were taking apart their kind for R &D not two weeks before and you’re going to tell him you’re studying him._

“Why?”

“You’re, you’re interesting?”

“Know that,” he says loftily. He pauses for a long moment and she realizes he’s working out the words, “It not rude on this planet to watch from the shadows?”

 _Oh Jesus, this is why I didn’t become an anthropologist._ “I’m sorry?”

“What you want?”

“To,” she has no idea what she’s even doing here anymore, “to learn? To talk?”

His head bobs in an avian-like movement, he steps back and she leaps out of her skin as his body breaks apart, parts flying and clanging with cacophonous noise before reforming. A proud, crested head lifts and he seats himself before the overhang, his eyes on level with her. “What talk?” he says.

She swallows hard and tries to pull herself together, “Tell me about where you come from?”

“Usually polite to start conversation with introductions,” his eyes are keen with amusement.

“I’m Darcy. Darcy Tyril.” And because she can’t stop herself, couldn’t shed the inane, proper shell of manners if she tried, “Who are you?”

“Me?” She can see him thinking again, rolling the words over before spitting them out. “Grimlock,” he pronounces finally.

“Grimlock,” she says. “You…you look like something that used to live on this planet.”

“What?”

“We call it, we call it ‘tyrant lizard king’.”

“King?”

She doesn’t want to give him ideas. There are more than enough aliens with eyes to conquer her planet, “The biggest, the strongest, the fiercest of all.”

He snorts, “You, Darcy, observant.” He stretches lazily, “Grimlock like the name king.” His head cocks in that peculiarly avian way once more, “Tell more, we trade, story for story.”

 _I suppose it’s never too late to change careers,_ she thinks. “Deal,” she says aloud.


End file.
